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    The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    Audiobook18 hours

    The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

    Written by Steven Pinker

    Narrated by Arthur Morey and Natalie Ross

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

    “Pinker writes with acid verve.” —Atlantic Monthly

    “An extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written.” —Noam Chomsky

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateDec 6, 2011
    ISBN9781455839728
    Author

    Steven Pinker

    One of Time magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today," Steven Pinker is the author of seven books, including How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate—both Pulitzer Prize finalists and winners of the William James Book Award. He is an award-winning researcher and teacher, and a frequent contributor to Time and the New York Times.

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    Reviews for The Language Instinct

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    • 4/5
      When it comes to something I don't know much about, I'm pretty easily swayed by other people's arguments. Like, I finished this book feeling it was pretty intelligent and interesting, and then I read some criticisms and reviews and heck, I don't know what to think. Still, I did find it interesting, and while the book looks deceptively slim for how long it took me to get through it, Pinker expresses his arguments clearly, with examples and sourcing, etc. His basic argument is that we're hardwired for language. That, as with our sight, hearing, etc, we have a 'language sense'; if properly stimulated during the critical period, our brains quickly figure out how to parse language (at least, the language spoken around us when we are at that age, even if that language is sign language). We don't need to hear every word or possible sentence structure (couldn't possibly) to pick up on the rules of grammar and apply them, when speaking and when listening. This only refers to the critical period; a child will learn grammar instinctively on being exposed to a language, but an adult must learn it by rote, in the same way as you have to learn to process visual input during the critical period for that, or you'll never have the same visual acuity as someone who did.Thus far, I think I'm going along with him. I do have questions of a sort of chicken and the egg nature: which came first, the brain's Universal Grammar module, or language that necessitated it? I'm inclined to think that the structures that we now use to understand language were used for something else earlier in our evolution, and became co-opted into our communications array (so to speak) over time. Our brains formed language, and then the language formed our brains...All in all, I don't know whether Pinker's right, but I found his work convincing. Having read a couple of other books on language, including Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass, and applying what I know from those too, I find it hard to disagree with Pinker even where I want to, for example about relativism.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Don't have the expertise in English that would allow me to take better benefit of this book. Still found it tremendously interesting in vary ways. And feel that made me aware of grammar in a completely new and fascinating way. Found it fascinating this idea that grammar is like a tool that connects all the mechanics of our expressions, the eyes, the face, the mouth, the hands, the body, everything is connected through grammar! “Complexity in the mind is not cause by learning, learning is cause by complexity in the mind”.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is the book that blew my mind in college. Never thought of language in this way ever. Perhaps it's the luck of having read this first in my dive into linguistics, but this is one of those books I look fondly back on. Totally made me become much more incensed by grammar Nazis--an idealistic position I now know--and then on a second read a couple years later, made me slid right into the in-between of prescriptive and descriptive ideology where I belong. Definitely recommend.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great book for linguists or computational linguists. Very engaging and informative.
    • 3/5
      Groundbreaking then, passé now
    • 5/5
      Probably worth having a written copy too to appreciate the subtleties of language analysis.
    • 4/5
      The incredibly dry chapters on the structure of English grammar marred my enjoyment of what was otherwise a fascinating insight into how people think and communicate. That approximate third of the book presented a real struggle for me to keep my interest. However the rest made up for it. I loved the chapters on the evolution of language and the mind.
    • 5/5
      This is my Bible--what I turn to for contemplation and reflection. I have pages of notes taken on Pinker's theories and am grateful for his "translation" of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar because I might never do it on my own.

      Now I need some fiction...
    • 3/5
      Very interesting and easy to read!
    • 5/5
      A classic of popular (and at times, fairly academic) linguistics. The ideal gift for someone with an interest in language who's tired of hearing nothing about it in the mainstream but arguments over "proper" English and word origin fairy tales.
    • 3/5
      This is listed as one of the New Scientist Top 25 Most Influential Popular Science books. The thesis is solid...the execution burdensome. Here's a thought: make a point; reinforce a point; if at that point you feel the need to keep talking, show the reader where in the footnotes or appendix all the repetitious extras can be found.

      Pinker spends an enormous amount of time talking about language grammar and the English language in particular, none of which have anything to do with why language is instinctual. It would have been a lot more tedious if I hadn't just listened to John McWhorter's lectures on The Story of Human language. The parallels could not have been coincidental...both relating elements of language development, grammar structure, proto-languages...but McWhorter wasn't talking about instinct. He was talking about language. Pinker undermines his case with all the side trips down linguist lane. Focus on instinct, not on the idiosyncrasies of a hodgepodge tongue.

      Pinker could have made his point very well in 100 pages. I admire succinct conveyance of knowledge. Pinker sure has a way of complicating concepts with extraneous details. I didn't admire this book.
    • 3/5
      I was disappointed a little bit, for I expected a more focused treatment of the relationship of language to its physical basis in the brain. On the other hand, the early chapters are an excellent explanation and introduction to modern linguistics. The excellence of the examples and illustrations suggest these chapters, at least, come from his teaching experience and lecture notes. The later chapters are interesting, as they deal with various aspects of language, but they don't really add up to a coherent exposition of the "language instinct". The chapter "The Language Mavens" is a diatribe against the language pundits of the media, which I thought irrelevant to his thesis.

      Nevertheless, the book is chock full of interesting topics in language, and reminded me why I got into linguistics as a grad student.
    • 4/5
      This is a very fascinating read. Pinker argues that language is an innate human instinct, and that our brains have evolved to have certain grammatical structures hard-wired. He gets into all sorts of different sciences - neuroscience, evolutionary biology, anthropology - and brings in a wealth of evidence to back up his ideas.The book is ostensibly aimed at a general audience, and assumes no prior knowledge of linguistics. However, it digs really deep into a lot of linguistic concepts, and sometimes I found that to be overwhelming and/or tedious and/or more information than I really needed to understand his point. Then again, he also goes into some really long tangents about what Darwin really meant by "evolution" and some other topics that seemed to go on way too long and those were also overwhelming/tedious, so I found myself skimming quite a bit of the book.Nonetheless, the information in here is fascinating, and Pinker has a nice wry wit and a pleasant writing style, so I enjoyed the book.
    • 4/5
      This is my first read from Pinker, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. A very accessible and insightful book that will profoundly affect the way you think about language.
    • 4/5
      This is the first of Steven Pinker's book that I've read and I must say I like the way he writes. There were many instances in the book where he wrote about complex stuff in simple and effective language.I felt at some points the text was very verbose while stating the obvious.Well, not that I'm an expert on the subject, but I partially disagree him when he says:"The mind is organized into modules or mental organs, each with a specialized design that makes it an expert in one arena of interaction with the world."I have read a few articles and a couple of books that state that the brain is plastic and one 'section' of the brain can be used for multiple 'actions'.Reference: The Brain that Changes ItselfThe chapter Family Values was the most interesting and I kept re-reading a few paragraphs just because I liked them so much."Status is the public knowledge that you possess assets that would allow you to help others if you wished to."
    • 3/5
      Dry. The linguistics-heavier sections are similar to what I've read before, and didn't seem especially well-done. Pinker seems unable to decide how pop to be - getting quite technical in some places, but failing to flesh out interesting examples. For example, I was interested by his note that "I haven't done any work" is functionally equivalent to the oft-deplored "I haven't done no work", but Pinker didn't continue on to consider "Have(n't) you done any work?", which only has a non-standard equivalent in the negative "Haven't you done no work?". Amorey Gethin has mentioned a number of other issues with the book as a whole. I also disagreed with some of his grammaticality judgements, which caused some problems. For example, "mice-eater" is just not correct in my English, sorry Pinker; the interesting question is not "why is an irregular plural permitted in this compound, but not a regular plural?" but "why do children make this mistake?". Pinker's whole idea is to support Universal Grammar, but he seems to rather jump at evidence; at the same time, I found the dearth of non-English examples a crippling weakness in such a project.
    • 4/5
      Pinker's books are always easy to read and absorbing. I believe that this was his very first book for a popular audience and he certainly got off to a good start. However, he contradicts himself in the first chapter and in a later chapter seems unaware that "flitch" and "thole" not only sound like they might be English words, but actually are. I'm right there with him when he debunks some stupid usage rules, like the injunction not to split the infinitive. But, although I'm a computer scientist, and know my Chomsky hierarchy and context-free grammars very well, his more technical discussion of grammar seem not to make sense. Somehow, this book feels a little lightweight; probably I'm not quite his intended audience.
    • 3/5
      I read this for my first and second language acquisition class, and while I didn't love it, I definitely didn't hate it either. I liked Pinker's use of examples when trying to describe complex language issues, however, I wished sometimes that he would have stopped at two or three examples per topic. Once or twice he would use an entire chapter simply to expound upon different examples that helped him make his point. I get it Mr. Pinker.

      If you're into books on language, then go ahead and give this a read.
    • 5/5
      If your not sure about this book. Just pick it up in the bookstore and turn to page 355. If find the chart there terribly amusing then go ahead and buy it. If not you might want to move on.

      Pinker has obviously thought about this, a lot.

      ...people simply assume that words determine thoughts...Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist this is not the same as a bunch of words.

      ...if there can be two thoughts corresponding to one word, thoughts can't be words.

      Our sixth sense may perceive speech as a language, not as sound, but it is a sense, something that connects us to the world, and not just a form of suggestibility.

      When a series of facts comes in succession, as in a dialogue or text, the language must be structured so that the listener can place each face into an existing framework.

      This mirrors my thoughts exactly- not only for words but for knowledge in general.

      ...there is a specific syndrome called Pure Word Deafness that is exactly what it sounds like: the patients can read and speak, and can recognize environmental sounds ... but cannot recognize spoken words; words are meaningless...

      Oh boy! This is sooo me! Often I have to visualize the written words before I can understand what was said.


      Great advice Pinker received from one of his editors-

      Think of your readers as your college roommates: people who are as smart and intellectually curious as you...



      I agreed with most of his conclusions but he lost me at;

      "The linguistic clumsiness of [age] might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies"

      I just don't see why it has to be a zero-sum game.

      It's funny that the next book I read was Paul Allen's biography. At the end he talks about how incredibly difficult it is to catalog and index vast amounts of information. Pinker was even mentioned by name! Certainly those two geniuses could pool their knowledge and come up with an algorithm based on Pinker's understanding of language to file and organize all that is known on a subject.
    • 3/5
      It's a hard one to treat fairly, this. Pinker is trying to do three things: 1) provide a general introduction to how language and the science of language work; 2) debunk some common myths, from the really dumb ones about splitting infinitives and suchlike; and 3) give a polemical screed against linguists and psychologists, and there are many, who argue that language in general is not necessarily a dedicated human capacity and that Chomskyan generative grammar in particular is not necessarily what actually generates linguistic productions.The first two tasks are relatively uncontroversial, and he completes them with reasonable aplomb. There are different choices a non-Chomskyan would have made about how to talk about certain things, of course, notably grammar (although I pity the poor general readin' fool that tries to slog through that chapter for reasons that have nothing to do with my opinions about the content--or Pinker's writing, which is fine--but merely that modelling syntax is a mess and a half and seemingly always will be). And I'm not quite sure his ridicule of the "language mavens" is always proportional to their sins (big difference between hamless logophily stuff like silly fake etymologies and shopping actual class shibboleths like split infinitives).But it's in what amounts to the same old nature–nurture debate that Pinker makes me turn a little green. Pretty much every linguist and cognitive scientist out there these days, as far as I know, thinks nature–nurture is at most 70–30 one way or the other. That debate is dead, or has at least advanced far, far beyond the stage it's presented at here, and with clearer vision Pinker might have realized that what he was actually doing was engaging in a bit of linguistic historiography on what was a powerful and perennial clash for a long long time. Instead, like a good Chomskyan, he constructs straw men as opponents, reducing the "language is learned" position's scope so that it only covers people who think language is 100% learned and leave 0% room for an innate linguistic module (which is nobody at all, not since, I dunno, Skinner in the fifties?) and then treats all his opponents like they fall into that tiny box.It's a way to sell copies, I suppose. But it makes you like th Bill Bryson of actual linguists, Steven Pinker, with your reducing Whorfian linguistic relativity to George Orwell's Newspeak, your reduction of learning to vulgar induction (pretty sure everyone in that camp thinks kids learn language mostly by pattern-finding and hypothesizing and trying things out), your trading of tired myths like the poverty of the stimulus and the idea that you can read a billion English (or whatever) sentences and never read the same one twice. Sometimes they are just little factual inaccuracies because you are trying to throw your discipline a coming-out party and want everyone to have a good time and want things to seem more exciting than they are, like when you overstate the scope of the McGurk effect. Sometimes, though, you're making choices that skew things in a more fundamental way, and you are most certainly not stupid, so I think it has to be intentional, building the broader perception of the field in your (camp's) image.I think I won't even get into the generative grammar stuff, except to say that clearly if you're trying to make arguments about what kind of sentences we find syntactically appropriate even if semantically odd, "colourless green ideas sleep furiously" doesn't license you to take structurally very strange (but interpretable and plausibly grammatical) sentences as examples, because there is nothing weird about its grammar. I also want to say that obviously a general-learning theory that works is not rule- but token-based, and that the weirder and more different your sentences get form normal speech the less relevant it is whether you can make a tree that works for them, since obviously real speakers find them problematic, even if not in the same way as word salad. "Oooh, technically, this is a sentence!" Right, and you make the tree more and more complicated to deal with it, which is the sickness of syntax. "Just move this and this and this and the theory can handle it!" Even when it's quite evident that the human being cannot handle a sentence like that (e.g., with more than a few layers of embedded phrases). Working memory, jerk. It seems so clear that grammar is a few basic parameters and then convention and probabilism gradually laying in patterns over free variation within those parameters. (In this regard I wonder about Chomsky's "minimalism," which I don't know much about. It may be that it handles the rulehappiness of the old ways.)It gets more innocuous after that. The chapter on language acquisition is good, although Pinker obviously has his biases as hinted above. I like the evolutionary explanation for the critical period--why spend limited genetic resources giving the old human abilities when statistically speaking the human is more likely to be young than old (since in the aggregate more of us are dead when we're e.g. 50 than 20, etc.), and when 90% (or whatever) of all people born will benefit from super language power at age 5 but only some smaller proportion at 35? And the the chapter on proto-language hypotheses (Nostratic, Proto-World, etc.) gives an interesting look into that freaky world (though it has nothing to do with language being an instinct--and there is another dumb error here where he says that the Indo-European people must have dominated everything from Ireland to India, obviously thinking of groups of them spreading out and hten staying in place and developing their different languages, when clearly migration and language differentiation happened simultaneously and in weird back-and-forth never-gonna-be-completely-traceable ways).But then in the last chapter he's ushing his thesis again in this cowardly way where he deploys Fodor to say "I hate relativism" and some smuggy smug grad student to sneer at the caricaturized version of the standard social sciences model (NOBODY except far rightists thinks human cultures can vary freely and without limit forever, my god. You say this has been the model "since the 1920s" but I think you mean it was the model in the 1920s). And of course he implies by proxy that relativism is more totalitarian since the blank slate (which is what you need at the beginning to have relativism if you are going to take biological determinism off the table, since either our differences are rooted in cognition or in culture) is the dictator's dream. Where to start? First--of course there is a fascist relativism where groups are qualitatively, biologically different and other. And of course a totally blank slate, which nobody thinks is what a person is, can be abused. But there is also a fluid, polyphilic difference-of-tendencies rooted in the various manifestations of culture that leads us to multiculturalism and good things. Pinker seems to be blaming relativism for both the biological and cultural variants, which is silly considering no one relativist can hold both positions.And alongside Pinker's "we're all one fam" nativist universalism there is clearly a totalitarian universalism where there is one single biological human nature and those who fall outside it are illegit. (In practice, of course, Pinker's universal human nature is more or less neoliberal--he is keen to reject Chomsky's progressive politics.)And the list of universals across cultures he gives from the work of Donald Brown is interesting and inspiring and takes up several pages (everything from gossip to tool use to extended families some form of privacy urge for sex to a "natural biology" where we recognize the differences between organisms as qualitatively different from those between other objects--so humans have no problem with a wheelchair being furniture and a vehicle but a big problem with a mule being a donkey and a horse--no, it's a mule, crossculturally!)This would make a great beach read if you felt no compunctions about skipping the sentence trees and if you didn't have a lot invested in the universalism/relativism and naturalism/arbitrarism debates, which I currently seem to. I'll be less judgy when my MA thesis is done, pinks.
    • 4/5
      As the title of this book might suggest, Steven Pinker, following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky, contends that humans are born with an innate instinct for language. Not with language itself, obviously, but with mechanisms in our brains that make it easy for us to learn language and that account for commonalities of structure that exist across all languages, despite their obvious variability. Some of Pinker's arguments and conclusions are stronger than others, but the general idea seems pretty sound to me, although I know there's still some controversy over it, two decades later.Pinker goes into a lot of detail about how languages are structured and how our brains process that structure. I found this detail quite interesting, but rather slow going, despite the fact that Pinker's prose is very accessible to the layman and is broken up here and there with moments of humor or the occasional whimsical quotation. Those who are just looking for a general overview of the subject might find those chapters, which make up about half the book, to be a bit much, but if you're at all interested in the nitty-gritty details of how the human brain constructs sentences, it's well worth reading.
    • 4/5
      This is indeed quite an amazing book. The writing style is simple, and Stevenmanages to handle this considerably complex subject with a great deal of dexterity. Each chapter is complete in itself, and I would recommend that each chapter be read on a separate day. This allows you to think about what has been written, before proceeding further. It is not a book for the casual reader, nor for the dilettante.It is a book that you must return to after a while.
    • 4/5
      A highly readable account on how language is an inherent characteristic of the human species, which I found a bit unpleasant to read at times. Pinker is such a good writer that I feel a little inadequate in responding to his book, but that aside, I thought it was an erudite book on a complex topic, like all Pinker’s books. It is also a bit controversial, as Pinker skewers many a layman’s misguided ideas about language, its origins, and its uniqueness to humanity. And not only a layman’s ideas; Pinker takes everyone from the social scientists to what he calls the ‘language mavens’ (editors and other arbiters of prescriptive grammar) to task for promulgating false ideas about language. I found Pinker’s more polemical chapters a bit uncongenial, mostly because they attack some of my own subconscious ideas about language. I didn’t realise that I felt as strongly about prescriptive grammar until Pinker attacked it and its proponents. I don’t mind Pinker’s attacks on some of the more archaic rules of grammar (such as split infinitives and ending sentences on prepositions, and so forth) but I did find his fulminating a bit tiresome at times, especially when he sets up some straw men that he can easily knockdown. A quibble, really, but still.Pinker is on much firmer, and to me more interesting, ground when he explains the psychological and evolutionary origins of language. This is simply brilliant and lucid exposition, and I enjoyed it immeasurably. Pinker’s explanation of how language evolves in children, and how this seems to argue for a ‘language instinct’ in humans (Chomsky’s Universal Grammar) is masterful. I also enjoyed his withering refutations of the assertions of those primatologists who claim to have taught chimpanzees sign language, and the more absurd claims of some anthropologists (such as the infamous ‘100 different words for snow’ claimed for the Eskimos).My one problem with the book is that it came out in 1994, so how up to date it is, in an ever-changing field, is problematic. I wish Pinker would update the book, but maybe he’s too busy writing books about the decline in violence (The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I intend to read next year), and whatnot.Highly recommended, but not one to swallow hook, line, and sinker.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the way that Pinker is able to make difficult and often dry subject matter appealing to a wider audience, but I think at times he went a bit far with the pop-culture references and it started to annoy me.
    • 3/5
      Took me a terribly long time to get through this book, but I did enjoy it a lot.
    • 4/5
      This is a book I gave to my oldest son one Christmas when he was in lovewith language and it looked like he was heading down the path to becoming alinguist. He went back to school before I could steal the book off his bookshelfto read it, so when I found it on his bookshelf in Seattle I was overjoyed. I'vewanted to read this book for a long time. It was worth the wait. Pinker is anexcellent science writer and he makes the (often difficult) material as easy tounderstand as anyone could. An excellent book.
    • 5/5
      Absolutely key book for those interested in how language evolved. Some of its central points are the subject of impassioned debate: Pinker is a Chomskyite, and argues that humans are born with an instinctual ability to learn the language spoken around them. Many others are less deterministic. Pinker's evidence -- the extraordinary speed with which children of two to four learn language -- is powerful, but underlying assumption of an innate "grammatical gene" is not accepted by many in the field. Despite the debate, those with an interest in how language developed and what it is should read this book. Not only is it thought provoking, it is very, very well written.
    • 4/5
      This guy is very clever. He is even cleverer at explaining the clever things he thinks about in such a clever way that you don't need to be nearly as clever as him to get to drips with them.I confess to getting completely lost in the grammar discussions and skipping forwards a little. But even then I found the rest of the book very rewarding indeed.The main reason I like this chaps books is because they are all about me.They are about you as well, so go and read them now.Beautifully written with a naughty sense of humour and one hell of a profound message.
    • 4/5
      Helped me to understand how language is learned and in this sense has been very helpful in my teaching of ESL students. A bit complex, but worth the time spent to read and understand it. The benefit is in understanding. You have to find your own way to apply it. But unlike many book on educational pedogogy, it's real and it's useful.
    • 5/5
      I greatly enjoyed this book, and read all but the last quarter of the last chapter about 5 years ago, maybe more. I set it down, and never finished it. I came across it again in the book case, started at the bookmark, and finished it. I know I never counted it in any of my yearly book lists, though it has influenced my thought since I started reading it. His thesis is that the mind has an instinct for language - that we are Not a blank slate when we are born. The mind makes certain assumptions about patterns, and what patterns are meaningful. He does this by looking at commonalities across languages, experiments in (and humor created to show) how people use words, and studies of how children acquire their native language. Pinker is a Darwinist, so he examines how this instinct could have been selected for, evolutionarily. His writing style is readable and clear, but on the dry side. He leavens it with humor, but still it takes some effort to get through. Here is one example, from the book opened at random: "To become speakers, children cannot just memorize; they must leap into the linguistic unknown and generalize to an infinite world of as-yet-unspoken sentences. But there are untold numbers of seductive false leaps: Mind -> minded, but not Find -> finded," and he goes on with more examples (found on page 281). Another example from p. 85: "The way language works, then, is that each person's brain contains a lexicon of words and the concepts they stand for (a mental dictionary) and a set of rules that combine the words to convey relationships among concepts (a mental grammar)." Then he goes on to discuss the examples that support this thesis. But for anyone interested in language, linguistics, and how the mind works, Steven Pinker's books are all essential reading. Just give yourself the time. They are not a quick read. There is much to chew on here.